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Saturday, March 30, 2013

I know something about drinking problems. I have struggled with one for my entire adult life. I continue to struggle with it today.

My extended family includes enough drunks to populate an AA chapter. I’ve had close friends and roommates who drag broken relationships, lost jobs, destroyed bodies, and jail terms in the long train of empty bottles that follows them everywhere they go. I’m familiar with alcohol abuse, and how, when you have a problem with it, it can infect everything.

Frankly, I couldn't care less what this guy has to say about anything, but it is noteworthy that al Starzeera would sink to publishing this tripe.

It goes on to present more of the hypocritical and sanctimonious pretense of 'concern' for Rob Ford they published regarding unproven, dishonest allegations of his drinking interfering with his mayoral duties. This yellow journalism is indicative of the histrionic pathology dominating the Toronto Star's editorial board.

Resembling monkeys flinging around their own feces, shrieking, York University students jumped up and down during a meeting in which they repeated the notorious anti-Semitic canard that Zionism equals racism. By denying national self-determination to Jews while trying to validate it for every other group, they have firmly established their Jew-hating credentials. Even the vociferously anti-Israel United Nations General Assembly voted to repeal the motion making that statement, but like most Communist-dominated institutions, the York Federation of Students, the radically politicized student union at York U, is living in a demented reflection of a disgraced past.

The purpose of the meeting was to vote for a resolution to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, the only genuine democracy in the middle east. The 200 students, many hijab-shrouded and over-representative of the Muslim Student Association and Communists, purposely held the vote during the Jewish holiday of Passover, knowing that most Jewish students would not be on campus to oppose it. To stack the deck further, Jewish student groups were not notified of the vote by the York student union that culls funds from them while working against their interests.

Joined by a few pathetic Munchhausen Jews (Jews who only profess their religion for the purposes of defaming Israel, or fake Jews who pretend to be members of the religion to get attention for themselves among anti-Israel fanatics) the resolution passed. The episode was yet another disgrace for one of the most discreditable universities in North America.

Obama knows that peace talks are going nowhere. First, because there is no way that Israel can sanely make concessions while its neighborhood is roiling and unstable — the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt, rockets being fired from Gaza, Hezbollah brandishing 50,000 missiles aimed at Israel, civil war raging in Syria with its chemical weapons and rising jihadists, and Iran threatening openly to raze Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Second, peace is going nowhere because Abbas has shown Obama over the last four years that he has no interest in negotiating. Obama’s message to Abbas was blunt: Come to the table without preconditions, i.e., without the excuse of demanding a settlement freeze first.

Obama himself had contributed to this impasse when he imposed that precondition — for the first time ever in the history of Arab-Israeli negotiations — four years ago. And when Israel responded with an equally unprecedented 10-month settlement freeze, Abbas didn’t show up to talk until more than nine months in — then walked out, never to return.

In Ramallah, Obama didn’t just address this perennial Palestinian dodge. He demolished the very claim that settlements are the obstacle to peace. Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are “the core issue,” he told Abbas. “If we solve those two problems, the settlement problem will be solved.”

Finally. Presidential validation of the screamingly obvious truism: Any peace agreement will produce a Palestinian state with not a single Israeli settlement remaining on its territory. Any settlement on the Palestinian side of whatever border is agreed upon will be demolished. Thus, any peace that reconciles Palestinian statehood with Israeli security automatically resolves the settlement issue. It disappears.

Yes, Obama offered the ritual incantations about settlements being unhelpful. Nothing new here. He could have called them illegal or illegitimate. It wouldn’t have mattered — because Obama officially declared them irrelevant.

Femen, the protest group which stages nude demonstrations to make their point about sexism, has been hacked. In recent days Femen incurred the ire of Muslims following the posting of a topless picture by Tunisian feminist Amina Tyler.

An Israeli helicopter training mission that resulted in the deaths of two pilots is an event Shaindlinger celebrates as "good news."

Shaindlinger's idea of good news is another reason that she and people like her apparently lead such miserable lives. But it is a reminder that free speech is a good thing and the truth of President Woodrow Wilson's words, ""I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking."

A histrionic vendetta The Toronto Star mounted against Rob Ford has continued unabated since his campaign for mayor began in the spring of 2010.

The Star - Bitter about its sermons going unheeded

The visceral hatred for the fiscally conservative mayor festering in the Star's offices has an obsessive component that most closely resembles the way a spurned, bitter spouse might feel for an ex-mate's new lover. In a way that is what happened to The Star.

The Star is the largest circulation daily in the Toronto and the leftist politics of its editorial board has matched the tone of the city's political leadership for the last decade; even longer if one considers Toronto before its metropolitan amalgamation. The alignment was so close that the satraps of One Yonge Street deluded themselves into thinking it was their guidance that was the principle influence of the thinking of lesser humans who cast votes in elections.

Like an unexpected Dear John letter waiting for them when they returned home one day, Rob Ford's mayoral victory changed that for The Star, and they still haven't recovered from the shock.

Ford, whose cost-cutting efforts and suburban plain-speaking contrast with everything the Star stands for, has been the focus of more energy expended by the Star to discredit him than living memory recalls. And The Star's vindictive reports have descended past the point of frantic criticism to reporting cheap gossip, hearsay and slander as if it were news.

The Star lied about Ford having assaulted a High School football player, it has stalked him at his home, it has promoted virtually any allegation it could find, no matter how petty or discreditable, in its unrelenting drive to bring down the victor of the last election. It has even tried to bolster ridiculous people simply because they shared the Star's disdain for Ford.

The Star's pathological enmity for Ford exceeds anything in living memory from a media outlet, and has only served to discredit them as a news organization.

In a report today, following their now unraveling account of Ford having allegedly been drunk at a military ball, the Star printed another story that makes the Mayor's description of that newspaper being "pathological liars" ring true.

Trying to salvage their discredited report about Ford's alleged alcoholism, the Star today trudged out two of Ford's council enemies with accounts that can best be described as slander and hearsay. Making it all the more preposterous is that The Star implausibly tries to present them as Ford's friends who are concerned for his well being.

Sarah Doucette, a leftist councilor who was among only a handful to effectively support the fanatical anti-Israel group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in Council, is quoted as saying, “I think it’s been known around City Hall for quite a while that he may have a drinking problem ... in some respects, I wish this had gotten out earlier, because if he needs help, please do it now.”

However, only later on in the article, is the admission that "Doucette said she hadn’t personally seen the mayor intoxicated" which means, unsurprisingly, that she is pontificating about something about which she has no actual knowledge.

More dishonestly, The Star presents leftist councilor Joe Mihevc's apparently spiteful, amateur diagnosis of Ford's as being someone who is "friendly with the mayor."

The Star reported: pressed for specifics, Mihevc pointed to last summer’s Salsa on St. Clair street festival, where he said he witnessed Ford “walking with a little bit of a funny bounce, and slightly slurred speech … intoxicated... I don’t want this to be the focus of my comments. My comments, frankly, are: My sympathies go out to the mayor on this one."

During the last election, "Friendly Joe," a city councilor, seemed more alarmed at the prospect of Ford winning the mayoralty than Mihevc appeared concerned about his own ward campaign.

Among the hysteria he wrote about the conservative candidate were such gems as "Ford is not about spending money wisely. He is about cutting basic services that he hates. Wisdom has never been his forte." Another of Mihevc's tweets said, "Let today be the start of taking back our city from Rob Ford and those (sic) would destroy the good city we are trying to build." With friends like that...

Apparently the shock of seeing someone having something to drink at a wildly popular street party offended the sensibilities of the Ward 21 councilor. It's too bad for the city that his overseeing a fiasco that cost Toronto's taxpayers three times its budgeted cost isn't the sort of thing that offends Mihevc.

The voters elected Rob Ford to be mayor in 2010, and not by a small margin either. He received almost as many votes as all of the other candidates combined. Torontonians resoundingly rejected The Star's anointed choices in favor of someone who promised to get spending under control. Ford has kept his promises about city spending. But the spurned editors at the Star haven't been able to get over their defeat. They should learn to move on, because they are fighting a battle that is doing more damage to their own reputation than to the decent public servant they are obsessed with destroying.

An investigation by the Globe and Mail flatly contradicts the Toronto Star's accounts of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's allegedly intoxicated behavior last month at The Garrison Ball charity dinner.

According to the Globe:

The Globe spoke to more than a dozen people who attended the gala and contacted everyone on its organizing committee, though only a handful returned telephone calls. Six members of the Garrison Ball’s 13-person organizing committee released a statement Tuesday, saying none of them asked the mayor to leave.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who was at the gala, said he chatted with Mayor Ford briefly. “He looked fine to me,” Mr. MacKay wrote in an e-mail.

Former budget chair Mike Del Grande, who in that post was one of Mayor Ford’s most loyal supporters, characterized Mr. Ainslie’s comments as “sour grapes” because Mr. Ainslie did not receive the budget chair position he had coveted earlier this year.

A CBC report confirmed that no member of the Gala's organizing committee asked Ford to leave the event and denies that Councillor Ainslie told anyone to remove Ford:

..the Garrison Ball's volunteer organizing committee said in an email statement to CBC News on Tuesday that they did not ask Ford to leave the Feb. 23 event.

"No member of the event’s organizing committee, including Councillor Paul Ainslie, directed the mayor to leave the event that night," the email said.

The Toronto Star has lied about Rob Ford in the past. I was interviewing Ford during his 2010 mayoral campaign on the day a Toronto Star story was published alleging that Ford had assaulted a high school football player he was coaching. Ford had to interrupt the interview a number of times to take calls from staff and supporters who were trying to locate the player so he could set the record straight. Either Ford was telling the truth, or he is the best actor I've ever met, and I've worked on movies where the lead actorswere nominated for and/or won an Academy Award.

In the end, the player, who disliked Ford, refuted the Star's account, though the left-wing newspaper stubbornly refused to apologize for its lies.

The Star has fanatically opposed Ford before and since his election victory. It did so to the point where more than one Star columnist not only insinuated, but outright declared that Torontonians must be "nuts" because they supported the cost-cutting municipal politician.

Rob Ford's success is alarming to the Star for a variety of reasons. They include that Ford is an opponent of the Star's special interest allies. Ford's popularity is like a slap in the face to the Star's editorial board, serving as a daily reminder that they are irrelevant to political opinion in the city in any substantive way.

Something The Star's propagandists should realize by now is that when it comes to his electability, no one cares what they say about Ford. It doesn't matter if he is drunk, grabbed the rear-end of an attention-seeking social climber, gave the finger to an obnoxious driver or whatever.

The people who support Ford do so because, unlike the politicians the Star favors, he doesn't spend other people's money like a drunken sailor. He has kept taxes and spending down and fought the predatory public unions to the point where they have accepted contracts the city can afford.

The Star's vendetta of hysteria, smears, lies, insults and mudslinging only solidifies support for the beleaguered mayor. At this point, Toronto's largest circulation daily's credibility about the city's mayor is no better than Pravda's reports about America were during the Soviet era or Iran's Press TV reports are about its enemies Canada and Israel.

So bring it on al Starzeera. Every time you pick a battle with Ford, he gets stronger and you look more desperate and ridiculous.

-----

(in the video below, at an event yesterday held at City Hall to honor legendary Canadian boxer George Chuvalo, the Toronto Star reporter acts like a no-class jerk, harassing not only Ford, but Chuvalo with questions about Ford's "drinking")UPDATE: Chrisie Blatchford's column on the Toronto Star acting like despicable high school bullies who think they're in a 'cool clique'

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Working Families Ontario, which is funded by the same labor unions closely affiliated with the New Democratic Party has issued a `cease and desist` letter against the Ontario Progressive Conservatives for an advertisement that depicts the advocacy group as a ``Liberal front.``

This is a rather worrying trend about Hudak`s PCs. They don`t even know which opposition groups are doing what. At the very least, they should give credit where it is due.

A commentary in today's Toronto Star decrying Canadian Border Security Services Agency cooperation with a COPS-like show about rounding up illegal aliens describes them as "immigrants" who are being treated badly by the federal government.

The Star equates them with legal immigrants to Canada who voluntarily participated in a mock swearing-in session for Sun News last year.

Monday, March 25, 2013

In her recent column in Macleans, Barabara Amiel, who is the wife of Conrad Black, wrote:

Turning to a local farce, I find it hard to envisage Sarah Thomson and Mayor Rob Ford addressing each other sexually. However, Ford allegedly had a lapse of incredibly bad taste and clasped the bottom of Ms. Thomson during a photo lineup at a party.This happened on the eve of International Women’s Day, which Ms. Thomson felt made it all the more degrading for her buttocks...Around 2002, publisher Thomson offered, using normal scatology, to “bed” my husband in return for him granting an interview to her newspaper. Though the proposition did not intrigue him, Conrad found it very enterprising and endorsed her for mayor in the last election.

UPDATE 3; al Starzeera, desperate to attack Toronto Mayor Rob Ford at every opportunity, has published an attempt to mitigate Thomson's proposition..""it was just a joke."

That begs the question, was her late night facebook posting, upon returning from a night of revelry, of the picture of she and Ford where she claimed her grabbed her posterior 'just a joke' from which she couldn't extricate herself without losing face?

The philosophy of this branch of traffickers is the same as that of the criminals in Sudan and the Sinai: "Every action is permitted - kidnapping, torture, rape (used as a weapon of coercion), murder, the sale of human flesh on the organ market - in order to achieve the objectives of jihad: the imposition of Sharia, a world war for the unity of Islam, the conquest and forced conversion of "infidels", the elimination of the culture and of the political, economic and military system of the Western civilization, and - in the foreground, as a symbolic event - the destruction of the State of Israel. In Sudan, the organization trafficking in human beings and organs is a primary component of jihad, and even there the Rashaida jihadists are “doing the dirty work". After international actions reduced the spontaneous flow of refugees to the Sinai, they are now abducting people in refugee camps, primarily from Shagerab, which hosts over 30,000 desperate people, most of them very young. Kidnapping with demands for ransom has also taken place in Egypt and Libya. Every refugee kidnapped by the traffickers means roughly 20,000 dollars for armed fundamentalism. The turnover of trafficking is around $ 35 million per year. The Sudanese President, Omer Hassan al-Bashir, has acknowledged the role of the Rashaida tribe in the slave and organs trade, but says he is unable to counteract this crime or even prevent arms depots being set up in Sudan.

Last year, Israel bombed one of these deposits while the Mossad is constantly on the lookout for others. EveryOne Group has been reporting this close cooperation between Hamas (which is part of the Muslim Brotherhood) and jihadist traffickers for years, and has provided ample evidence.

The average anti-Israel protester may be brighter than a typical cockroach. But there isn't a huge amount of evidence to support that. They have, however been conditioned to claim that everyone they don't like is either a "racist" or a "bully" or a some other combination of buzzwords whose meaning they don't fully understand.

At Claremont College in Southern California, anti-Israel protesters set up a "checkpoint" where they stopped staff and students to subject them to harassment in the cause of their fanaticism.

Professor Yaron Raviv, an Israeli citizen who teaches Economic at the college, complained to campus security and the anti-Israel protesters were compelled to cease blocking the entry to the dining hall.

According to pro-Palestinian website Electronic Intifada, One of the protesters, Najib Hamideh, acted as if he had the authority to demand people's identity and asked the professor to identify himself and his reason for being at the college where he teachers.

According to Hamideh, Raviv next referred to all the Students for Justice in Palestine members as cockroaches, and then asked him which of the Claremont colleges Hamideh belonged to. When Hamideh replied that he attends Pitzer College, Raviv then responded that “all Pitzer kids are cockroaches,” Hamideh says.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Earlier this month, The Rose, a women’s newsletter issued by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, declared that through its support of Israel, Canada is complicit in “war crimes.”

Alongside claims that “patriarchy was introduced into First Nations cultures through European colonization,” the publication asserts that Canada “is allowing Israel to terrorize occupied people, breach international law, normalize home demolitions … and steal resources.”

Almost immediately, Jewish groups issued condemnations of the three-page document as “a racist propaganda tool filled with half-truths,” according to the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

Representatives from all three major parties joined the chorus, with the most colourful coming from Liberal leader Bob Rae: “I continue to be astonished by the extent to which ideas which should be on the ‘loony tunes’ margins of politics have now been adopted by a union which represents thousands of its members.”

As is now well-known, Ezra Levant apologized for his anti-Gypsy rant last Monday, both on-air during his Sun TV show The Source, and in print in Sun News publications.

Though they failed in their efforts to abort it before it debuted, and detesting it as they do, Canada's political left still keeps a keen eye on the Sun News Network and in particular, it's most flamboyant personality, Ezra Levant.

Levant's ability to combine rhetorical dexterity with showmanship has, on practically a weekly basis, forced attention to a variety of issues that have embarrassed Canada's left-leaning political cliques. Those include included the waste and corruption and deception by many of the leaders of the Idle No More movement, which Labor leaders and NDP and Liberal politicians had hoped to exploit as means of embarrassing Stephen Harper and his Conservative government.

Levant also ridiculed, belittled and exposed the hypocrisy of left-wing sacred cows David Suzuki and the Occupy Movement among many others.

So it was with virtual glee that the Toronto Star's editorial board and the likes of far-left media outlets such as rabble.ca and The Vancouver Observer seized on a monologue by Sun TV's Ezra Levant in which he injudiciously and unfairly characterized Gypsies as a people with a primarily criminal culture. Delighted in their outrage, immediately came calls from the left for his prosecution for Hate Crimes.

Levant's motives for apologizing, six months after-the-fact were questioned by both his detractors on the left and supporters on the right. Sun News' application for a CRTC Common Carry license and the possibility that Hate Speech charges would be pursed by Ontario's Attorney General were among the speculative reasons.

But regardless of why, Levant's words were well-crafted, sounded sincere, and explicitly retracted his earlier statements about Gypsies.

Yet desperate to silence Canadian TV's Grand Inquisitor of left-wing hypocrisy and deceit, calls for his criminal prosecution have not abated despite Levant's apology last Monday.

Which in a way, proves many of the points Levant makes when he preaches his gospel of absolute free speech and thunders about the hypocrisy and double standards of a Canadian left who would have others live by rules that they hold themselves above.

In November 2010 the National Post and later other media outlets did extensive coverage on an anti-Semitic thesis produced at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). The Department of Sociology and Equity Studies produced a number of theses with anti-Semitic themes, the most well-publicized of which was by a Jenny Peto wherein she accused the Jewish community of conducting Holocaust education to further the aims of "Israeli apartheid." She also, in contradiction to any credible empirical evidence, defamed the Jewish community by claiming it was dominated by "racist" ideologies.

Unlike Levant, who apologized for slurring an entire people, Peto doubled down, making the claim that it was she who was owed an apology after her anti-Semitic, academically inept polemic was brought to light.

Peto was roundly and vociferously condemned by conservative and pro-Israel commentators, and there were calls for an investigation into the teaching practices and deficient standards at the radical, biased, politicized Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. University of British Columbia Professor Emeritus of Sociology Werner Cohn noted that Peto's and another anti-Semitic thesis which shared OISE instructor Sheryl Nestel as a thesis adviser "consist of hate propaganda, possibly in violation of the Criminal Code of Canada," but no one among those so called "right-wing" voices actually called for criminal prosecution or Human Rights Commission proceedings against them.

And what about the left side of the political spectrum? One would expect those people who are so enthusiastic about the use of state apparatuses to penalize Hate Speech would have wanted them used in such a blatant case of Jew-hate.

But this was not so in the case of Peto and OISE. Hate Speech in the service of "progressive" causes, like the destruction of Israel and defaming Canada's Christian conservatives, is not only tolerated but vigorously, if somewhat preposterously defended by the far left.

For the hypocritical would be-censors on the left, Hate Speech is only Hate Speech when it is uttered by conservatives and those they disdain.

The Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui produced a diatribe about Stephen Harper's alleged "inconsistencies on hate laws." There are a number of valid reasons why those laws should not be employed against Levant. But if Siddiqui and his fellow travelers are genuinely concerned about inconsistencies in the application of unjust laws that seek to censor opinion, they would best look to their own hypocrisy first.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

9-11 conspiracy theorist Phillip Marshall killed his two teenage children, his dog and himself when he apparently learned there was no hope for reconciliation with his estranged wife.

Marshall was previously arrested for battery against is wife in 2008. But of course the Holocaust-denying Iranian regime is asserting a CIA conspiracy is responsible for Marshall's death in order to cover up some "revelation" about 9-11.

Friday, March 22, 2013

As this blog has already noted, Alternatives International is a fanatical, Marxist influenced organization that gets over a million dollars a year from Canadian taxpayers. Among its "allies" are the anti-Semitic Canadian Arab Federation, the Young Communist League of Cuba, and the violent, anti-capitalist group, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. It was the conduit of funds for the Sea Hitler boat that tried to break Israel's blockade to prevent arm smuggling to Gaza.

Hopefully, now that the Canadian International Development Agency is being brought under the aegis of the Department of Foreign Affairs, someone in government will take notice of what that despicable organization is doing and cut off its funding and charitable status.

True to stereotype, these tech geeks mostly are young and male and bursting with industry buzz phrases. So when one of the speakers at PyCon started going on about “dongles” and “forking” (the former being a tiny hardware device, the latter being a common programming term), it was natural that a few of the audience members — employees of a company called Play Haven, as it happened — began riffing comically on this odd jargon.

Unfortunately, they did so within earshot of one Adria Richards — a fellow tech geek evangelist who also has a reputation as a sort of politically correct language commissar within the software-developer community. Ms. Richards snapped a picture of the two men with her cell phone, and posted it on Twitter with the name-and-shame annotation: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles.”

Her photo showed the name-tag of one of the men. As a result, the pair were approached and censured by the conference organizers. Two days later, one of them was fired by Play Haven — “which sucks,” he wrote on a message forum, “because I have three kids and I really liked that job.”

From a review of The Trial of Christopher Hitchens in the moronic, neo-Marxist website rabble.ca, published by the same-sex spouse of NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies:

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, he spoke of caution, of not veering into overreaction, yet soon he was picking fights with anyone who dared question U.S. reaction or even contextualize the attacks as "Anti-American" or worse. His early smears of Noam Chomsky and many others allowed for the entry -- even into some quarters of the Left for a short time -- of talk of loyalty and patriotism.

Hitchens became the patron saint of what some came to call "The Decent Left," those who signed the "Euston Manifesto." Seymour’s first book, The Liberal Defence of Murder, gives a history and analysis of this tendency, and is well worth the read. But Hitchens went far beyond even the "decent left" in his calls for civilizational warfare, his shocking and even genocidal Islamophobia (stating that he refused to share a planet with this "enemy"), even, tragically, his disavowal of his early and stalwart anti-Zionism.

The review is peppered with the predictable vapid Marxist jargon; reactionary, comrades, revolutionary socialism, McCarthyist and so on...

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Ed Corrigan, an Immigration lawyer based in London, Ontario railed against US drone attacks on terrorists in Pakistan. Perhaps he was upset at the loss of potential clients.

He said to Iran's English language propaganda service:

And it’s going back to the worst times of totalitarianism and the regimes that are heavily condemned in the United States but now the United States is adopting the same policy, the same rhetoric; you know the Nazis for example call the French resistance terrorists when they were fighting to win the liberation of their country and I think Americans have forgotten their history and have fallen into this same trap of unbridled power... They're drunk with it..In fact these are war crimes.

"Critical Thinking" as a term suggests the ability to objectively analyze and critique data. But as a methodology taught at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) it takes on an entirely different, sinister meaning worthy of a creation of the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell's 1984.

Turning logic on its head, the Marxist-influenced faculty teaches that Critical Thinking means to assume that American foreign policy is always in the wrong, that Western mainstream media is deceptive for the purpose of serving the government, that history is taught to further the aims of an oppressive patriarchy, and that the public, with the exception of those who are taught OISE's brand of Critical Thinking, are a mass of brainwashed dupes.

OISE's message - media is part of the conspiracy

In other words, at the University of Toronto's cultish ideological incubator for pedagogy throughout Canada, a "Critical Thinker" is someone who uncritically thinks exactly what they are told to at OISE.

That practice takes on an appalling twist at OISE's Centre for Media and Culture in Education. With the pretext of teaching "Critical Media Literacy" OISE is attempting to cast doubt that the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington were perpetrated by Muslim terrorists and that the Taliban was actually sheltering the al Qaida terror organization.

OISE Lesson

The word "allegedly" is something media must use when reporting on a crime before the courts that has not been proven. Its use in other contexts is generally for the purpose of casting doubt on the veracity of a report. That word makes a number of appearances in OISE's Critical Media Literacy in Times of Warlesson.

According to OISE, the al Qaida terrorist network "allegedly" carried out the 9-11 attacks, "it was in Afghanistan that bin Laden..allegedly organized al Qiada and established training camps," and it was in Afghanistan where the Bush Administration "claimed" al Qaida was based.

Rather than being an educational institute, OISE is a centre of indoctrination. How else to describe a school that promotes and encourages Marxism, an ideology that inevitably results in totalitarianism and has led to decades of repression and tens of millions of political murders?

This sort of sympathy for the Taliban is common at U of T's OISE. One of the Marxist professors at the Institution that produces people who devise school curricula throughout Canada recently produced a paper that attributed the cause of women's oppression in Afghanistan not to the Taliban or the harsh form of Islam it represents, but to a conspiracy among western governments, corporations and NGO's.

OISE's professors are academics of the most anti-intellectual kind. They are a type, to use a description provided by Emma Teitel in Macleans, who speak "another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific–only the words they (use aren't) shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they (are) used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality... "

Toronto blogger Blazing Cat Fur received a visit from the police last week because he sarcastically mused OISE needs to be purged or burnt to the ground, whichever is more effective.

I have another idea. The spoiled, overpaid, dense OISE staff who are so sympathetic to the Taliban should be sent to live with those fanatics for a year. That dose of living outside their self-indulgent academic bubble might not do them so much good, but it would certainly benefit the students they would otherwise poison for that year.

On the night of March 18th, the Cuban political police organized a mob of more than 200 people to attack a group of 50 Ladies in White in Palma Soriano who were holding their monthly meeting, dedicating it to the 10th anniversary of the Black Spring crackdown when 75 dissidents were arrested and sentenced to prison. These actions resulted in the hospitalization of one of the Ladies in White and the violent arrests of various neighbors who came out in their defense.

Brian Lilley's book covers waste and corruption that Canadian taxpayers subsidize to the tune of one billion dollars each year.

You can nominate CBC Exposed as best Canadian book of 2012 through THIS LINK. (UPDATE - March 28 - the CBC has killed the nomination page - it had 37 comments - 34 of them nominating CBC Exposed and they had hundreds of "plus ratings")

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

The hyper-politicized environment at University of Ottawa, already notorious for a student mob that shut down a talk by conservative pundit Ann Coulter three years ago, has highlighted its own ridiculousness yet again.

Soon to be in trouble at
U of O for hegemonic appropriation of
a Gay identifier

A straight student named Cody Boast who attended a campus Pride event to show solidarity with Gay students was told to change his clothes because he was "wearing too much pink."

Boast, who identifies as heterosexual, says he was there only to show support for the LGBTQ community, and was surprised that the incident occurred; nonetheless, he heeded Hammett’s orders.

“I didn’t want to fight with her, so I changed,” said Boast.

“[She told me] it’s like dressing up like Bob Marley at a Black History Month event,” he continued.

For a lot of unthinking leftists, one of their mantras is that they can't be a self respecting self-identified "progressive" without harboring a hatred for Israel.

Most of these people have at best a superficial understanding of the issues involved and little or no historical knowledge of the Israeli/Arab conflict nor any real knowledge of the middle east's geopolitical realities.

But at the CBC, the ability to stare at a camera or speak into a microphone with a smooth voice is a frequent substitute for actual insight and intellect. So the reflexive anti-Israel bias at the CBC against the one truly progressive democracy in a region beset with fanaticism, violence, ethnic conflict and intolerance regularly comes through.The efforts of Honest Reporting Canada (HRC) have forced the CBC to correct themselves and admit to these biases on innumerable occasions. Their work is so effective that it led David Heap, a pudgy, unkempt organizer of the Sea Hitler Gaza boat to bemoan that CBC reporters had privately told him they would like to do more stories on Palestine, but the focus from HRC had made their editors wary of it.That assessment is probably more true of CBC television than radio. The Ceeb's radio service must figure that what they broadcast to their small audience goes largely unnoticed. Most of the people who do dial in to CBC Radio 1 probably only half-listen to the tedious, uninformed droning of its hosts.But on occasion, their bias is so egregious that it does call out for attention and in today's Toronto Sun, HRC's Mike Fegelman wrote a column addressing an outrageous CBC Radio interview that portrayed Israel as a nation of child abusers. The tax-funded state broadcaster's report was so distorted and absent of context it could be held up as a showpiece of propaganda.You can read Mike Fegelman's response at the HRC website.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Tariq Ramadan is probably the world's best known living Muslim academic since the death of Edward Said. Last week, he appeared at the University of Toronto to deliver a lecture on ethics and the role of religion in the public sphere.

Asking for indulgence from the crowd gathered in the fully attended lecture theatre in Northrop Frye Hall, he explained he was a bit disoriented, having just arrived from the airport. It was nonetheless a bit surreal to hear Ramadan spend the first five minutes of his talk discussing how various interpretations of the definition of 'human being' make the concept of his talk difficult. It would have more logical to speak of the varying ways people define what is "ethical.," But Ramadan is a philosopher, whose field of study seeks logic and frequently takes a convoluted path to arrive at it, on those few occasions it actually does. In this instance, defining ethics may have been redundant since, as it eventually became clear, Ramadan sees that definition predetermined for each of us based on our religious affiliation.

"Islamism" conjures mental images of enraged Jihadis whose closed minds are filled with violence and hatred. Tariq Ramadan is the opposite of that stereotype in every conceivable way. He is a soft-spoken, engaging Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University. Emphasizing the need for religious ethics in public life, he referred to the common ethical cores, but also noted differences in the substance of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

The evening could have been a model for the type of multi-faith approach reasonable academics have extolled for ages.

But there were a few ominous hints in Ramadan's speech that suggested Canadian Muslim reformer Tarek Fatah might not have been far off the mark when he called the Oxford professor "a man committed to the goals of the worldwide Islamic jihad as laid out by his mentor, Sheik Qaradawi, and his father, the Trotsky of world Islamism, Said Ramadan.."

Calling for religious values, and the implication being that meant Islamic religious values in particular, to have a greater role in politics and the public sphere, the philosophical groundwork for Sharia Law's being accepted as a facet of Western multiculturalism is the logical extension.

He will have enablers in the media and among liberal academics who shriek and decry whenever a Christian politician talks about faith-based values, yet these same people embrace Ramadan's aim of increasing Islamic influence in the public sphere.

Ramadan didn't discuss that influence in terms of religious practice, but rather in those of "ethics", but as he noted that the term had different meanings within religions and cultures, religious practice is the most likely explanation for the aspiration he expressed.

Saying he didn't want to change Islam, but "the minds of Muslims", Ramadan, while repudiating violence, held on to fundamentalist tropes such as how the hijab, a head covering meant to enforce modesty among Muslim women, could be "freeing" for them.

From the many hijabs in the audience, as well as the number of questions from students discussing their own experiences as Muslims, the crowd appeared to consist mainly of students from U of T's Muslim Students Association, which co-sponsored the talk.

In response to one of those questions, when discussing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Ramadan, who implied that the fault was one-sided, with all the "injustice" perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians, said it was not a religious conflict but a political one.

While religion is quite obviously a facet of that conflict, there is also a clear hypocrisy at best in the way Ramadan characterizes it.

Why else would the treatment of the Palestinians be more of a concern to him than the even worse than the "political" discrimination faced by Palestinians in Lebanon? No honest person discussing the issue of Israel/Palestine doubts for a moment that were both Israelis and Palestinians all Muslims and if the conflict were ethnic rather than religious, the Muslim world would care no more about it than they do about the discrimination faced by Kurds in Turkey, Baha'i and Zoroastrians in Iran, and Shia in Saudi Arabia. All these face brutal oppression at the hands of Muslim governments, among many other examples of such Islamic state-sponsored discrimination.

Though he implied otherwise, it is obvious that Ramadan's interest in the Palestinians is that of a Muslim promoting Muslim interests.

According to Tarek Fatah, Ramadan has said, “We (Muslims) should all be careful not to be colonized by something which is coming from this consumerist society … It should be us, with our understanding of Islam, our principles, colonizing positively the United States of America.”

By promoting that goal with charm, smiles and wit rather than animated proselytising or threats, Ramadan may create an environment more accepting to Islam as a political force in the west. Whether the honesty of his aims are articulated by him or perceived by others remains to be seen.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Unless you're in Antarctica, you may have seen none other than a bat-eating spider. (Yes, that's right folks!) A new study released on March 13 that surveyed scientific journals, blogs and even Flickr accounts for them showed that they're a growing phenomenon across every continent, except for the aforementioned, Antarctica. Fifty-two incidents, to be exact, were found of spiders munching on bats-an animal with few other natural enemies, and researchers are concluding that spiders consume bats more frequently than previously thought.

One of the TDSB's role models they extol for Black History Month is serial rapist Eldridge Cleaver.

In his 1968 collection of essays titles Soul on Ice, the former Black Panther leader wrote:

"Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women – and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.

I started out practicing on black girls in the ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day. When I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically."

The TDSB's homage to a rapist

Interestingly, later in life, Cleaver renounced his past and became a conservative Republican. Naturally, the ideological nitwits at the TDSB omitted that from his biographical notes.

Though there are many incredible role models for Black History Month who are Republicans or conservatives, the fanatics who run the Toronto District School Board don't want children "of color" to grow up to admire anyone who doesn't embrace identity politics and entitlements.

Among the conspicuous omissions from the TDSB's list of role models are the brilliant authors and philosophers Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, the military hero and former Congressman Allen West, and Former US Secretaries of State during George W. Bush's Presidency, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice.

UPDATE: And as one could predict, the TDSB's indoctrination has produced children who are praising a gang of racist, murdering rapists and drug-dealers. Identity politics at its worst. Keep up the great job, Toronto District School Board!